How long?

He tried to think it through.

The propagation of ash and dust in the stratosphere was well modelled, and they had a good handle now on the surface propagation of the stuff. But he didn’t know how the Moonseed would spread in the mantle.

If they were going to the Moon, they would have to go while they still could, before the launch gantries at Canaveral sank into the sand or tipped into the Atlantic…

› Try a few weeks. › Impossible. I think. I %$33$% › This session is c! %$£$#

…and he was out of it; the chat room emptied.

Maybe that was enough. Geena would find a few bright back room guys, see what kind of straw men they could come up with, let the naysayers throw their rocks.

This was the stuff NASA was good at. Responding to an emergency. It was an organizational tic that irritated the balls off him when he was trying to push his projects through, but now it might be useful.

If there was a way to get to the Moon fast, NASA would find it.

He finished his food and stepped outside. The sky had turned pink-grey.

On a whim, he cut down a couple more streets and walked to the Embankment that lined the north-east bank of the river. The Thames was broad and placid and clean. There was a garden here, cut through by a roadway, and he found a place he could sit and look at Waterloo Bridge and the big modern concrete buildings squatting like toads on the south bank, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the National Theatre.

The sun had set to the south-west, behind the rooftops of London. The horizon was tinged with a silvery lustre. Above that a yellowish haze, like LA smog, filled the western sky. The haze changed in colour and extent, ranging from a greenish yellow through orange and deep scarlet.

As he sat there and watched, the dusk crept on, and orange and olive tints washed through the whole of the sky — even to the east, over the river, which shone like copper in the light. Deep scarlet was gathering in the west now, even as the first stars started to appear, directly above him.

The sunset colours faded for a time, and the deep summer blue filtered down the sky, making it look almost normal. But now a new surge of blood-red seeped into the western sky, and looked set to linger long after the conclusion of a normal sunset.

Volcano sky. Shit. He’d seen nothing like it since Pinatubo.

He was getting cold, and he was tired as hell, and he got out of his seat to look for a cab.

He was due to leave the next day, for Washington. He wondered if he’d ever see Britain again.

6

Geena set up a meeting at the Outpost, with Jays Malone and the young missions-operations whiz he knew called Frank Turtle. When she arrived Jays and Frank were already here, sitting at a table with a couple of empty bottles apiece; she ordered a fresh round, with a Diet Coke for herself.

After introductions the guys resumed their conversation.

“…We were planning a shit-load of weird stuff before Challenger blew,” said Frank Turtle, talking rapidly, a little nervously, perhaps over-awed. “We were going to launch Galileo and Ulysses on Shuttle. Because both of those ships were going to Jupiter — and because the launch window was tight — we’d actually have had two Shuttles on orbit at the same time.

“Not only that, you’d have had both of those ships with liquid oxygen/hydrogen loads in the payload bay. And we never truly figured how we were going to handle that. We didn’t know how to keep the load topped up on the pad. Would you run cryogenic lines through the skin of the orbiter? And we couldn’t figure out a way to dump it fast enough in case of an abort. For instance you might be flying an RTLS abort, which is a powered fly-around back to the Cape, a hell of an aerobatic manoeuvre which we’ve never, in fact, tried. And in the middle of this you’d have to dump your forty thousand pounds of LOX and hydrogen, separately.

“Or what if you do a transatlantic abort and finish up at some airfield in Africa? How are you going to process the stuff there? It takes three days to get the C-130s out there, and in that time you could get an explosive build-up of gases in your payload bay. Well, hell, after Challenger we just never looked at that again…”

Geena was content to listen for a while, absorbing their personalities, the bar’s atmosphere.

The Outpost was a beat-up old bar off NASA Road One, not far from the Johnson Space Center. The NASA folk held launch parties and post-mission parties here. It was just a low-roofed wooden shack, its walls plastered with ageing Shuttle crew signed photos, crew patches and other memorabilia. One of the photos had been airbrushed Soviet-style to remove an unpopular female astronaut from her one and only spaceflight. There was a scuffed shuffleboard deck and a pool table.

But not everybody was a NASA nut. There were plenty of good old boys who looked like they had their heads on upside down, sitting in a wall around the bar and glowering at strangers, cradling Buds and watching basketball on the noisy TV.

Geena didn’t particularly like it here. The Outpost was a close, dark wooden box. It was photogenic, and a lot of times you couldn’t move in here for the TV crews. But what depressed her was the sense of antiquity, the walls encrusted with layers of yellowed photos lying over older pictures, like Henry’s geological strata. The Space Age reduced to a nostalgia object.

But it was inevitable, she supposed; after decades the space program had developed its own history and peculiar human traditions, like everything else people ever did, from baseball to religion to politics.

Or maybe she was just sour because she didn’t want to be here, that somehow her life was still tangled up with Henry’s.”

Geena studied Frank Turtle. She realized belatedly that Jays’s description of him as “young” was entirely relative. Frank had to be forty-five at least. But he dressed young, which she thought was a good sign, in a crumpled denim jacket and jeans and open shirt, and with a tangled mop of greying black hair over thick Coke-bottle glasses.

He wore an electronic button-badge showing the Venus explosion, cycling through that startling burst of light every few seconds.

As he talked, she learned Frank Turtle had done a series of jobs at JSC, getting hands-on experience of space operations by working on Shuttle operations as a mission designer and flight controller. In common with a lot of people here, she suspected he had applied for some of the astronaut recruitment rounds, in his early days. But for the last few years — hell, she realized, more than a decade — he had worked for a department called the Solar System Exploration Division; and, with his buddies, Frank’s job was to blue-sky the future. If you had to get to Mars in a decade — how would you do it? NASA had to be positioned to answer questions like that, when the call came, and that was Frank’s job.

Of course NASA had been waiting for that call since 1969, and it hadn’t come yet. But Frank and his like were still prepared, constructively dreaming, ready to respond.

A lot of careers got kind of stuck at NASA. There was a shit-load of recruitment back in the early 1960s, when NASA ramped up for Apollo, and a lot of those guys were still around now. They liked to work for NASA, and there was really nowhere else for them to go anyhow, and even with all the downsizing over the years it was still difficult for the federal government to shed people from a place like JSC. So here they all are, ageing Boomers, getting older and greyer and using up space; and here was Frank’s generation, in the line behind them, no doubt creating their own logjam in the resource pool.

“…So,” Frank said to her now, wiping a spume of Coors from his mouth. “You want to talk about going to the Moon. Why the hell?”